Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria

Concerto No. 24 in C Minor for Piano and Orchestra, K. 491

• Composed: 1786
  
• Premiere: 1786
  
• Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
• CSO notable performances: First: November 1958, Max Rudolf conducting with pianist Robert Casadesus. Most Recent: April 2013, Roberto Abbado conducting with pianist Lars Vogt. Notable Pianist: Daniel Barenboim, 1966
• Duration: approx. 31 minutes

The winter before he composed Don Giovanni saw Mozart busily involved with stage works. His principal project was The Marriage of Figaro. Yet three times he took time out from the opera to compose piano concertos. The resulting works, far from being trifles used to relax and divert his energies from the more taxing dramatic work, are true masterpieces. The concertos in E-flat major, A major and C minor are among Mozart’s greatest achievements, though each was written within a few weeks while he continued to work on Figaro.  

The mood of each of the three concertos is closely associated with its key. It may not matter to us (or at least to those of us who do not have absolute pitch) that K. 482 is in E-flat major, K. 488 is in A major, or K. 491 is in C minor. But the choice of tonality mattered a great deal to Mozart. He did have perfect pitch, and furthermore the tuning system in use in his day gave each key a subtly distinct quality—something that has been lost to the current era of equal temperament. Hence he associated each key with a particular expression. E-flat major, A major and C minor are each allied with a special mood in Mozart’s mature works. 

The carefree gaiety of the E-Flat Concerto and unruffled grace of the A Major Concerto differ markedly from the tragic intensity of their successor in C minor. Interestingly, the slow movement of K. 482 is also in C minor, and its mood is similar to that of K. 491. Although K. 491 was composed just a few weeks after K. 482 and K. 488, and although all three works were written under the influence of Figaro, a greater contrast could hardly be imagined. The E-flat Major is forthright and assertive and the A Major is gentle and understated, while the C Minor is dark and brooding. As musicologist Alfred Einstein wrote, the composer “evidently needed to indulge in an explosion of dark, tragic, passionate emotion.” No record remains of how the C Minor Concerto’s first audiences reacted to it, but they probably had difficulty assimilating the outer movements. This concerto is obviously not an example of Mozart’s “social” music. 

Writing K. 491 gave the composer some trouble, even though he completed it only 12 days after finishing the A major. The original score contains numerous corrections, changes and rewritings, including up to four reworkings of some passages. Such indecision is uncharacteristic of Mozart, who often composed an entire work in his head before setting it down—without need of revising—on paper. 

Some commentators consider this concerto a precursor of 19th-century romanticism. Indeed, it does display its emotions overtly in its chromatic themes, adherence to the minor mode even in the finale, rich instrumentation and passionate outbursts. It is more than an anticipation of a later aesthetic, however. It is a fully romantic conception. Just as Haydn wrote romantic music in his Stürm und Drang (literally, “storm and stress”) period, so Mozart on occasion wrote music overtly expressive of the darker side of human feeling. Most of his pieces in C minor (and also those in G minor) share this atmosphere. It is no surprise that Beethoven, the composer who more than anyone expanded the romantic ideal in music, greatly respected this concerto. He studied it, performed it and paid homage to it in his own Third Concerto, also in C minor. 

Despite its wealth of thematic material, the first movement is dominated by its opening melody, an elaboration of a chromatic descent that contains hints of most of the movement’s subsequent harmonic regions. This tune is decidedly non-pianistic and in fact is never heard unadorned or complete in the solo instrument. This theme is launched no fewer than three times in the orchestra prior to the entrance of the piano. Mozart’s typical tonal strategy works powerfully here: the music refuses to leave the turbulent home key of C minor throughout the entire orchestral exposition. An undercurrent of tension mounts as we await, with growing impatience, tonal motion. The piano enters at long last, but not with the main melodic material. Only once the piano breaks into rapidly moving sixteenth notes can we understand the solo instrument as catalyst. The sixteenths take the music away from the tonic toward the sunnier, less intense world of the relative major. There we remain, hearing several new thematic ideas which try to dispel the world of C minor. Excitement builds in the development section, but inevitably the music returns to the main theme in the original key. In most other minor-key concertos, material that originates in the relative major in the exposition returns in the happier key of the tonic major in the recapitulation and thereby lays to rest the movement’s principal tensions. Not here! The recapitulation stays relentlessly in C minor. Once the cadenza ends, the coda brings the movement to a quiet end that suggests neither resolution nor relaxation. 

The insistence on the minor mode in the first movement makes the major-mode opening of the slow movement extraordinarily beautiful. The utter simplicity of this first theme adds to its beauty. The poignant world of the first movement is not to be forgotten, however, as the music returns to C minor for the first of two episodes, featuring the woodwinds. 

A halting yet somehow graceful C-minor tune, that never goes more than four measures without stopping, opens the last movement. The pauses in the main theme are filled in a variety of ways in the ensuing variations: first with piano figurations, then bassoon arpeggios, etc. Unlike most minor-mode concerto finales, this last movement does not move decisively to the uncomplicated world of the tonic major. The music twice tantalizes us with almost carefree variations—one in the relative major, one in the tonic major—but it always returns from its journeys to the home key of C minor. And there it ends, with an almost dance-like variation that goes directly into a coda. 

—Jonathan D. Kramer